Today I shall criticize yet another Utopia. This Utopia isn't famous in the literature. But it's considerably superior to many better-known Utopias—more fun than the Christian Heaven, or Greg Egan's upload societies, for example. And so the main flaw is well worth pointing out.

This Utopia consists of a one-line remark on an IRC channel:

<reedspacer> living in your volcano lair with catgirls is probably a vast increase in standard of living for most of humanity

I've come to think of this as Reedspacer's Lower Bound.

Sure, it sounds silly. But if your grand vision of the future isn't at least as much fun as a volcano lair with catpersons of the appropriate gender, you should just go with that instead. This rules out a surprising number of proposals.

But today I am here to criticize Reedspacer's Lower Bound—the problem being the catgirls.

I've joked about the subject, now and then—"Donate now, and get a free catgirl or catboy after the Singularity!"—but I think it would actually be a terrible idea. In fact, today's post could have been entitled "Why Fun Theorists Don't Believe In Catgirls."

I first realized that catpeople were a potential threat, at the point when a friend said—quotes not verbatim—

"I want to spend a million years having sex with catgirls after the Singularity."

I replied,

"No, you don't."

He said, "Yes I do."

I said, "No you don't. You'd get bored."

He said, "Well, then I'd just modify my brain not to get bored—"

And I said: "AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE"

Don't worry, the story has a happy ending. A couple of years later, the same friend came back and said:

"Okay, I've gotten a bit more mature now—it's a long story, actually—and now I realize I wouldn't want to do that."

To which I sagely replied:

"HA! HA HA HA! You wanted to spend a million years having sex with catgirls. It only took you two years to change your mind and you didn't even have sex with any catgirls."

Now, this particular case was probably about scope insensitivity, the "moment of hearing the good news" bias, and the emotional magnetism of specific fantasy.

But my general objection to catpeople—well, call me a sentimental Luddite, but I'm worried about the prospect of nonsentient romantic partners.

(Where "nonsentient romantic/sex partner" is pretty much what I use the word "catgirl" to indicate, in futuristic discourse. Th...

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